by Simon Ings
Far behind us, down the hill, in the town, came a scream, then some shouting, and another scream, then some children screaming. The sound didn’t stop. It swelled.
The feast in the cemetery had only ever been a ploy, to separate us. By reducing the number of menfolk in the town, they had made Goliata easier to attack.
I took off my shirt, wadded it up and pressed it tenderly to my head. Unable to see, I was forced to listen. There was very little gunfire in the cane town. Whatever the matsangas were doing, they were doing it with knives and clubs. The villagers’ screams were running into each other now: one long, continuous death-squeal. With a loud concussion that forced my eyes open, an orange fireball rose above the town. I blinked the stickiness away and stood up. Beside the fire, muzzle-flashes illuminated the roof of Naphiri’s concrete blockhouse. The earth-mover was on fire. I watched the rooftop guns sputter, and thought of the miserable, dull nights I had spent on that roof, armed with a gun I hated and did not know how to use. One by one, the guns went out. Soon, smoke was pouring from the windows of the blockhouse.
Sam, wailing, blood pouring between his fingers, staggered towards the brow of the hill, fell against a gravestone and crumpled.
The hooded men wandered casually over to him. One grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head over the edge of the stone. Another sat on his legs, pinning him there. The third took out a machete and chopped his neck open. Then, muttering, blaming his tools, he tried to use his machete like a saw. The boys gathered round to watch.
No one was paying any attention to me. I edged away. The men at the gravestone separated and Sam fell to the ground. His head was still attached to his shoulders, but only barely. In the light of the braii we had lit together, preparing for the feast, Sam blinked at me. His tongue flapped uselessly. ‘Gah,’ he said.
They brought him over to me. I turned to run, trod with my bare feet on a sharp stone, fell over and grazed my knees. They dropped Sam in front of me. The boy who had taken my boots fired a clip into Sam’s neck to loosen the linkage there. The sound tore through my wounded head.
Once they got it off, they played football with it a while, then passed it to me. ‘Carry it,’ they said.
By then it didn’t look very much like Sam, or a head, or anything.
I picked it up.
‘Watch this.’
Two of us ran away in the night, another was shot trying to escape.
‘Look at this.’
Three collapsed under the loads they’d been given to carry and were shot through the head where they lay. The matsangas used the seventh, Naphiri, for demonstration purposes, working at her strenuously until long after she was dead.
‘Pay attention.’
We learned very quickly to obey the matsangas.
‘Watch. Look at this.’
Whatever else it was, it was undoubtedly an education. Following their attack on the town on 15 October 1984, RENAMO soldiers had walked sixteen prisoners of war out of Goliata. Six weeks later, the nine of us who survived reached our journey’s end.
The camp was not isolated. There were other RENAMO camps nearby, and even villages. Soldiers in misbegotten headgear rode downhill into camp on motorbikes, churned the site to a muddy slough and sped off again. Peasants walked uphill into camp, bearing food. Incredibly, once they had delivered their supplies, they were permitted to walk out again. The women weren’t always so lucky, but among the girls forcibly ‘made women’ by the bandits, some seemed to have won back their freedom. They walked out of camp in the morning, and back in again at sundown. I wondered after a while whether I too might not be free to go. They were not even teaching me how to kill any more. Most of my days I spent with about a dozen others in a chicken coop, my hands behind my head. At sundown, we were allowed to take our hands off our heads. An hour after that, we were allowed to lie down. At first light, they made us kneel again and after a breakfast of nsima, with occasionally a relish of turnips or rotten fish, they told us to put our hands on our heads again. It was as if, after the initial excitements, our captors had run out of imagination. After a couple of months, they weren’t even making us kneel.
I leaned my forehead against the wire of the chicken coop, looking out. No one seemed to be paying the least attention to us. Maybe we were not prisoners at all. It might be all in our heads, now. It was the logic of the place.
It was not too difficult a puzzle, working out where we were. Only Gorongosa boasted so many RENAMO militia. Mount Gorongosa was RENAMO’s headquarters in Mozambique, a mountain fastness the overstretched FRELIMO military could not possibly overrun, and dead in the centre of the country, within easy striking range of the Beira Corridor. Only the Corridor could throw up the sort of spoils carried through our camp, uphill, to RENAMO’s officer elite. Truck-loads of flour, crates of batteries, barrels of oil. Soldiers rattled back and forth in jeeps, in Toyota trucks, on motorbikes, on bicycles, even. They wore uniforms stolen from dead government troops. The uniforms often had tears in them, and terrible bloodstains. The soldiers grinned and strutted in the dead men’s clothes, showing off their ‘wounds’.
The RENAMO command proper rarely came down from the mountain, and preferred to communicate by radio. They surrounded themselves with camps of bandits. The bandits, in turn, buffered themselves with kidnapped villagers. The displaced villagers must in their turn have come to some unspecified agreement with the locals living in the shadow of the mountain, because everybody on the mountain got fed sooner or later.
Every few weeks or so a new batch of soldiers would come dancing into the camp and slash at their chests with knives – zsa! zsa! zsa! – and a man on stilts and a stylized leopard mask rendered them immune to bullets by splashing their wounds with a secret herbal preparation. Men without hands would enter camp to beg from the men who had mutilated them. The old man who fed the chickens had a scar the width of my thumb running right across his throat. A scalped girl shambled from one side of the compound to the other with her broom, intent, it seemed, on sweeping away the very foundations of the houses.
Then, just as I was getting comfortable, they moved me down the hill and I was placed in one of the villages nestling in the shadow of the mountain. Rather than raze it, RENAMO had decided to control it. I limped after the village’s régulo, up to a drab cement blockhouse in a dusty, unshaded lot behind the marketplace.
I asked, ‘What is this?’
He blinked up at me as though I were stupid. ‘It’s a school,’ he said. He showed me inside.
On the desk at the front of the immaculate room sat an unopened box. ‘What’s that?’ I said.
The régulo shrugged. No one told him anything. I opened the box. It was full of brand-new textbooks, printed in Maputo, ferried north at great expense, bound at one time for a place like Goliata. The books were another of RENAMO’s spoils, plundered from some hijack on the Corridor.
I studied them. I turned to the régulo, incredulous: ‘You want me to teach from these?’
The régulo shrugged. ‘They’re books, aren’t they?’
Certainly they were books. History books, printed in Sweden, edited by an academic friendly to FRELIMO’s socialist cause. There were whole chapters on Marx, Lenin, the evils of apartheid and the glory of the anti-colonial struggle. There was a foreword by FRELIMO’s first president and chief political martyr, Jorge Katalayo.
I held my tongue.
Every day for the next seven years, RENAMO sent their children marching into school to have me teach them about Marx, Lenin, the evils of apartheid and the anti-colonial struggle. In all that time, no one ever questioned me or stopped me. Not the régulo. Not his minders. Not the dignitaries (RENAMO’s honoured guests) who came by, once in a while, to witness the renaissance of learning in this liberated, liberalized, free-market corner of capitalist Mozambique.
They had never met a teacher before. They figured I knew what I was doing.
GLASS
1
The walls of the old iron b
athtub rise around her, white and smutted. It is early Tuesday morning, 30 August 1983, and Stacey is getting ready for the funeral of her last grandfather, her mother’s father, Harry Conroy.
She lies in the bath, staring down at herself, lost in contemplation of the way the water has split her in two. There is the upper part of her: her knees, her chest and her head, of course, mustn’t forget her unseen head; this is the tanned, air-breathing part. Then there is the other part, the bigger part by mass, her back, her bum, her feet and halfway up her calves: the pallid, aquatic part.
She lies there, a little shaky. She is fourteen years old and they are burying her grandfather, the man who stepped in when Mo was incarcerated, who for eight years has been a solid presence in her life. But she is fascinated, none the less, by the way she can will this change in her nature, transforming parts of herself by lowering and raising them in the water.
She dips her hand in, slowly, watching her fingers tilt as they enter this other world. It looks as though her fingers are broken. She knows this is refraction because they have been doing this in class. Light entering water changes course. Light always takes the quickest path, and water, being dense, is slow compared to air. So light changes direction, bends, seeking the quickest way through the water. Light is clever.
Her body is too gross a thing, too meaty and massive, to finesse the water this way. It lumbers through air and water the same, insensate, especially now that the bath has cooled to blood heat. Her fingers can barely detect the difference between the air and the water – only this little tingle as her skin passes from one medium into the other. This trembling line like a blade held sensually, edge on, to the skin.
Her mother calls: ‘Are you out of the bath yet, Stace?’
‘Hang on!’ Stacey shakes out of her reverie and reaches for the soap. Her mum says she spends too much time in the bath. It is one of those things that mothers say, but today is not a day to argue.
Stacey remembers how when she was little, for a special treat, Mo would let the bathwater run until it reached all the way up to her neck. She remembers looking down and thinking: this blue-green thing. It seemed amazing that this swimmy alien body was actually attached to her head.
Her name is Stacey Conroy. This is the name on her birth certificate, her mother’s maiden name, the name she goes by at school. She does not like the name, and in her TV work she does not have to use it.
Stacey appears in advertisements, and has been doing so, off and on, since she was about six years old. Money has not been a motivation; Harry’s wrestling promotion has expanded through syndication to the point where the two suits he employed to run it full-time don’t even bother taking a salary any more. Stacey’s own stock options – Christmas and birthday gifts from her granddad, held in trust until her twenty-first – will see her through college and long beyond.
Deborah, her mum, has not been pushy, either. If anything she has tried too hard to manage her daughter’s expectations, discouraging her keenness for the camera. The push has come from Stacey herself. She loves dressing up. She has grown up among costumes, among capes and masks, the whirr of sewing machines, the sour flop-sweat smell of trailers and toilets and dressing rooms. She knows, and can identify by smell, every one of a hundred different make-ups, alcohol rubs, unguents and deep-heat preparations; let loose among the caravans on fight night, she has been found, come evening’s end, wrapped in bandages like a mummy, in sequinned gloves and a padded sparring helmet several tens of sizes too big for her four-year-old head, weeping with frustration because she has got herself inextricably tangled in some visiting fighter’s Stars and Stripes cape.
‘The theatre is in my blood.’ She says this in front of her bedroom mirror, wondering at this body that has always daunted her, like a boisterous pet she has no idea how to care for, this body, growing in maturity, which seems capable of no end of practical jokes, hair, farts, spots on the end of her nose.
Deborah comes into her bedroom without knocking. This is bad enough, let alone to be caught like this in front of the mirror, not even fully dressed.
‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’ Deborah wants her daughter to give her a very big hug. This could be made easier on two counts: mum could just relax a bit and stop pretending that She is Comforting her Daughter (‘How are you feeling, sweetheart?’ ‘Are you holding up, pet?’ ‘Come here, petal, come on, poor lost lamb’: all this in the last half-hour); second, she could take the goddamn chopsticks out of her hair, agh, that nearly went in my eye…
Deborah’s kimono is black, or started out that way, though the black is hard to see beneath sequinned dragons and lotus flowers and thewed, half-naked samurai. Her face is panstick white, her eyeliner is red – art following grieving nature. Her fingernails, three-inch stick-ons, will have to wait till they get to St Patrick’s because she still has to drive. They live out of Miami now, in Belle Glade, on the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, well out of the operating range of the funeral home’s cars. Deborah claims to be looking forward to the drive, that it will steady her nerves.
No one passing them is going to imagine they are on their way to a funeral. Deborah is dressed as a geisha; Stacey’s own get-up is relatively conventional, but her wig is green, and Ben Donoso’s charm is hanging on a silver chain around her neck. Pray it holds together for the day.
‘Come along then, my poor brave chicken,’ says Deborah, releasing her at last. Deborah is running out of endearing animals. In the driveway, waiting for her, a stab at her own father’s brand of heartiness: ‘Hurry up there, monkeybrains.’
Stacey’s surname is Conroy. The name lacks conviction. It lacks truthfulness. It does not capture who she is. It carries no echo of the man she considers her real father, the man her mother married and visited in jail every month until he was released; who filled her first conscious memories, ages two to five, with light, and now is vanished, breaking his parole: the felon Mo Chavez.
In the car, Deborah winds down the window and lights up a joint. She wouldn’t normally drive while smoking but it is getting late, the service is at two and she needs time to put her nails on. Also there is the question of dosage and timing: she is fifteen minutes late. Since 1969, when she and Mo stumbled upon its happy side-effects, Deborah has been using cannabis to self-medicate her epilepsy. Fourteen years of trial and error have taught her to respect her body and its rhythms: in excess, or taken at the wrong time of day, her smokes can trigger the very seizures they normally suppress.
Deborah maintains that Mo’s marijuana runs were for her, more or less. The weekends he spent on his boat, the nights drinking with Nick Jessup, his so-called business partner; all this in the interests of Deborah’s health and well-being, with no eye to the profit or the danger to himself. Stacey knows this is crap: a comfort story for a child who’s missing her daddy, OK, maybe, but not a line you can expect to keep on spinning, year after year, into the child’s teens. Her mother smokes regularly, it is true, but how much pot can one reasonably together woman be expected to inhale in one lifetime? Deborah forgets that Stacey was there with her in court, listening to the coastguard’s testimony. When they lifted the weed out of Mo’s hold, the boat rose a good two feet by the waterline.
The journey to the church has the clean lines of a proposition in mathematics: when you leave the town behind you’re in farmland. The farms stop and the wetlands begin: an abrupt, engineered transition. A canalized river separates the wetlands from the suburbs. You have taken one road to get this far. The road is straight, the landscape is flat. This whole journey could be re-run in Turbo with virtually no loss of definition. (Turbo is the new Sega game in their laundromat, and Deborah thinks it weird that Stacey plays it so much.) From here the buildings rise in steps, and at a certain point – a point you have to learn is there, because there is no outward marker, no change of flavour or scene – you are in Miami.
Outside the church stands Michio Barondes, half-Japanese, half-Peruvian, the Yellow Peril, in joke-shop whiskers and a
canary-yellow polyester cape, weeping into his embroidered sleeves.
The church is packed. There’s Jackie Gleason, sat discreetly near the back. He must be seventy by now; his TV career has pretty much bombed but he still crops up in Smokey and the Bandit movies. The Mexican old-guard have turned up in their stage gear, and one or two of the home-grown boys have followed suit; Chuck Ryan, resplendent in his heel’s garb, a Northwest Mounted Police parade uniform with white dress gloves, stands just inside the door to conduct the family to the front pews. Donoso the Vampyre delivers the oration, his white-face and blood-dribble ruined by tears, his thick black hair plastered down like lacquer. He leans on his best stick, the knob fashioned like a skull, red glass jewels for eyes.
Ben Donoso is a trainer now; one of the best. His fighting days are behind him. In 1980 a visiting fighter hurled him through a table. This was in the ring, a stunt both fighters had paced out a hundred, a thousand times. The table was mocked up the way it was supposed to be, each joint carefully weakened, the whole thing hefted and swung, tested for weight and balance. No one, least of all Ben, cared much about the prop’s appearence. It was bright yellow, it looked good under the lights; no one, in the heat of preparation, thought to wonder what happens to linoleum veneer when it shears.
Donoso hobbles off the podium in tears. Harry was his friend, the man who used his own shirt to staunch the blood when Ben’s femoral artery was severed, who rode with him in the ambulance as he faded out of consciousness, who was there with his wife and kids when he woke up. Harry funded the wrestling school he runs now, and from which he turns loose, each year, arguably the best fighters in the country; not just showman wrestlers but shootfighters, too, athletes and innovators.
Stacey hasn’t seen Ben Donoso in a while. She has fond memories of him from when she was a little kid. Why else, on this day of all days, would she be wearing this weird mumbo-jumbo charm he gave her, back in Mexico? Since his accident he has not been around so much. He has the school to run. Also, things were not so easy with Grandpa. After the accident, Harry was not such an easy person to be around.
